Jim Abrahams

With college friends Jerry and David Zucker, Jim Abrahams is co-founder of the Kentucky Fried Theater in Madison, Wisconsin, in 1969. ZAZ (as they came to be known) subsequently moved their satirical group to Los Angeles and set up a theater there. They made their first venture into feature filmmaking with "The Kentucky Fried Movie" (1977). Directed by John Landis, the film was a memorable series of absurd, vulgar and (mostly) wildly funny send-ups of popular culture. Most of their subsequent work has been in a similar vein. "Airplane!" (1980), "Top Secret!" (1984) and "The Naked Gun" (1988) pay satirical homage to, respectively, the disaster film, the spy film and the police film. Trademark features include scattershot pop culture allusions, rapid-fire anything-for-a-laugh gags, and rugged, but notoriously stiff, second echelon actors from the 1950s (e.g., Robert Stack, Leslie Nielsen, Peter Graves).